Lab rats go wild in Oxfordshire
A documentary film proves that laboratory rats can still survive in the
wild.
03 February 2004
MARK PEPLOW

An award-winning film has created some unusual stars: lab rats. The
documentary, which follows 75 lab rats after they were released into an
Oxfordshire farmyard, has surprised biomedical researchers by proving that
lab rats quickly recover their wild behaviour once liberated.

Manuel Berdoy, an animal behaviourist from Oxford University, didn't set out
to make a documentary. He was simply curious about whether lab rats retain
some of their wild instincts. So he took 75 docile rats that had spent their
lives in the laboratory and released them into the wild.

Berdoy expected the rats to cope with their new conditions, but he was
impressed by how quickly they adapted. The rats found water, food and hiding
holes almost immediately. They started to establish social hierarchies
within days, and it was only a few weeks before they had established an
extensive pattern of paths across the colony. Although the rats had spent
their whole lives being fed on pellets, the females immediately prepared for
pregnancy by foraging and storing appropriate food.

"They went from shuffling, like they do in a cage, to hopping around just
like wild rats within a few days," says Paul Flecknell, an veterinary
scientist from Newcastle University who has seen the film.

The results won't surprise animal behaviourists, says Flecknell, but many
biomedical researchers have been amazed by the film. Most believe that an
animal that hasn't been outside a lab for 200 generations will be incapable
of fending for itself in the wild, he says. "This shows that while we can
take the animal from the wild, we have not have taken the wild out of the
animal" says Berdoy.

Berdoy filmed the experiment to add a little something extra to his
conference reports. But the footage proved so popular that he decided to
edit it into a documentary-style film. He called it The Laboratory Rat: A
Natural History.

The result has taken a small part of the film world by storm, netting awards
at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in the USA - often called the
wildlife equivalent of Cannes - and the Living Europe film festival in
Sweden."I didn't expect it to have an impact like this" says Berdoy.

Read the rest at Nature
http://www.nature.com/nsu/040202/040202-2.html

Comment:
Is this an indication of hardwired behaviour??  If I get lost in the wild,
will I start hopping about and preparing for pregnancy, or does my
consciousness override precursory innate behaviours (allowing me to quietly
starve to death) ??

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek.
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